Red Emma’s

We are thrilled to host three authors from Monster House Press, a new(ish) publisher that prizes beauty and respect for the written form.These authors will present their works exploring the intracies of bodies, gender, and social conditioning. Concepts that are frequently tackled by analytical forms instead will be shown through prose and literary experimentation. Michelle Gotchlich: Void Sets Void Sets bears an acute & tender hand toward the inscrutable nature of being. Engaged in the milieu of void sets (code elements that do not show in surface content) & employing interruption, (day)dream, & other fragmented mental activity as valid manifestations of voice, these poems evince & commune with the buried codes & elements of repressed & othered worlds. Embedded in a culture latent with cruelty & expectation, here are poems that make space for the beautiful aberrations found in the socially estranged realms of mental illness & gender nonconformity. Void Sets emits a harrowing & necessary glow, one that extends across the enigmatic chasm between persons & reveals forgotten corners, untouched depths: The dream of mine / where you’re endless water / and I’m a tiny diver.   Wendy Lee Spacek: Psychogynechology  Psychogynecology is a mythic manifestation of feminine energy cured into a spell. An inconceivable moment jarred from the maw of a bird’s warble, a worn banister in a house left to rot. These poems tussle & chew with the repression housed and implanted historically and culturally, through centuries and narratives, in the female body. Like storage units, these poems elicit a feeling of forgotten objects, of power to regain. A counsel of women driven to a last pack in a rural Indiana gas station. The relation of the man with the woman, the woman with the man. The invisibly dark matter tabooed out of tradition. Somehow ancient & precisely of this moment, Wendy Lee Spacek’s poems minutely & intricately eschew the distinct beauty, sorrow, & tragedy of the customs and relations between genders—between humans and what they have made.   Morgan Eldridge: Pretty Pretty Prison Pretty Pretty Prison is a small chap book containing poems and short stories all centering around the deconstruction of the social conditioning of woman carried in the bones of body and the complexity of relating through changing realities/epistemological breaks. One reader, wrote in a response:  “An intense insight into a stormy mind of wildflowers and carnage. The book even feels like a bashful ghost: quality stock emblazoned with a modest, grey-purple-morning-mist text, all bound in a hand-sewn black cover. Pretty Pretty Prison will lock you in, kiss you, reject you, beg you come back, and – you might barely notice – let you go.”